


Ascension

by bramblePatch



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Combined Alternia/Beforus, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, F/M, Politics, Troll Culture, ambiguous quadrants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 08:36:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3643728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not quite the world that either Meenah or Karkat know, but she's in charge and he's determined not to get swept under the rug.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ascension

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FindingZ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FindingZ/gifts).



Three paradox degrees weird and a causative permutation deeper than we're used to looking in this local cluster of universes, we'll find a reality where the troll homeworld is not Beforus or Alternia, but Ultimatia.

Traditionally this empire counts its sweeps from the ascension to the throne of the current empress. So when we say that these events happen in Sweep 1 of the current era, we mean that they occur within the first sweep after the untimely demise of Her Implacable Vaingloriousness and the subsequent rise of her heiress apparent, Meenah Peixes, who would be crowned under the imperial title of Her Imperious Condescension.

Of course, our story also happens to take place, from a certain point of view, shortly after the universe was created.

 

There were a lot of situations that Karkat Vantas had found himself inexplicably waking to over the past few sweeps, and this - well, this sure was one of them.

At least this time there was sopor, although the recuperacoon was shallow and honestly not very fresh, and there was entirely too much ambient noise. With a grumbled curse, he hauled himself up to look out of the 'coon's port, and paused. Well, that was new.

He was reasonably certain that he'd never seen the open, hectic dormitory before, although at the same time there was a weird sense of deja vu; probably he'd seen that particular setup in some movie at some point. He didn't think it was too out of the ordinary for young-adult civilian lowblood quarters, anyway, the kind they shoved you into when you were to old to sit around in your wiggler-hive with your thumb up your ass; a long, high-ceilinged block with haphazard rows of recuperacoons adhered to the walls and a low doorway at each end of the room. Trolls, ranging from about his age to a few sweeps older lounged on top of their recuperacoons, talking to each other or staring into electronic screens, or hurried through the room. None of them wore anything higher than olive, and most of them were browns and maroons. 

And - yes, thank god - there was a small personal locker next to each 'coon. It took a little work, but he managed to reach the one next to the recuperacoon and snag a sweater and jeans, and dressed perched on the lip of the recuperacoon. The sweater bore his complete joke of a symbol in his usual dark grey, which was at once both really fucking weird and no weirder than him being here in the first place. He watched the room carefully, and almost thought he recognized a curve of horn at one point, but by the time he could be sure, the girl who might or might not have been a Megido had already slipped through a door and out of sight.

For a long moment he seriously considered just staying put until someone who knew what was going on found him, but it occurred to him that there was a very good chance that no one would be able to give him that information, or at least that most of the ones who would were people who were incredibly prone to wandering off and ruining everything without checking in. With a groan, he flicked the last of the sopor slime out of his hair and half-jumped, half-slid to the floor.

Nothing outside the dorm looked familiar either, and he resigned himself to exploring while keeping his head down and drawing as little attention to himself as possible. This worked for almost a hundred feet of hallway, at which point he attempted to brush past a trio of unfamiliar greenblooded adults, clustered in furtive conversation, and one of them reached out and grabbed him by the back of his shirt.

"That's the little weirdo she likes, isn't it?" a second of the group asked, looking down at Karkat with slightly harried disinterest in her jade eyes, like Karkat didn't even rate on the list of things that were ruining her day but could probably fight his way into the running if he cared to try. He bared his teeth in reflexive reply, too freaked out to say anything; she seemed to be more addressing her companions anyway.

"Thinks so," said the troll currently holding onto Karkat's shirt, and gave him a little shake. "Yo. Squirt. You got any idea why the heiress is flipping out?"

"I- no, why the blistering sunfucked hell would I know that?" Karkat sputtered, bewilderment and fear meeting, falling in love, and producing an entire litter of anger. "I don't know anything, asshole, let me go, you -"

Karkat's captor shook him a little, enough that the young troll had to shut up to avoid biting his tongue. "Watch it, runt," he growled, then looked at his companions.

The third troll shrugged. "I say we throw him at her," she opined mildly. "If nothing else, stabbing the little ingrate might calm her down a bit so someone civilized can get a word in edgewise."

" _Stabbing_?" Karkat sputtered.

"Or you can talk sense into her yourself," the jade woman said, slowly and annoyed, as if talking to a particularly dull child. "Yeah, sounds like as good a plan as any anyone's come up with so far."

 

In short order, Karkat found himself being dragged, still struggling and complaining, up several flights of stairs and into what was clearly a higher-class portion of what seemed to be a rather extensive building, and unceremoniously shoved through a door. He stumbled, tripped, landed on his hands and knees in what appeared to be some kind of ornamental pool of water that filled half the block, and looked up to find the business end of a rather large and ornate gold trident.

Well, he figured, at least he'd die as he'd lived: pissed off and utterly confused.

The killing blow never came, though, and after a few seconds he managed to focus on something beyond the prongs of the culling fork. Namely, the girl holding it, who gaped at him for a moment longer and then dropped the weapon with a delighted laugh and offered him a hand up. "Shouty! What the shell you doing here?"

Karkat grimaced, but allowed Meenah to pull him to his feet. "Fuck if I know. Peace offering, I think."

He was startled, although perhaps not entirely surprised, when she pulled him into a brief, fierce hug; he gingerly patted her on the back in return and waited for her to release him. Once when he was younger he'd lost an arm-wrestling match with Feferi and his shoulder had hurt for weeks; seadwellers were stronger than they looked.

"No but reely, what is going on," Meenah added, stepping back and looking, if not exactly serious, at least grave and businesslike. "Not that I'm bitching over these great digs, but what gives."

Karkat shook his head, and buried his face in one hand. "You've got as much info as I do," he said, "although the other bastards around here seem to think that a, you should be here, and b, you'd know who I was, so we probably at least have enough time to figure some shit out before someone figures we're interlopers and culls us."

"Is it just us?" Meenah asked, a little reluctantly; there was something in her voice that wasn't quite vulnerability, but it was definitely less brash than her usual.

"No idea," Karkat admitted. "I think I might have seen Aradia downstairs but she was gone before I could catch up with her."

He looked around, getting a better feel for his surroundings; a private leisureblock, palatially appointed, with a couple of low reclining platforms along the edge of the broad, tiled pool; the whole room was done up in shades of tyrian and gold, with the imperial Pisces sign very much in evidence. There wasn't much question that this was meant to be the private sanctum of someone of Meenah's status.

And in the corner, tucked away discretely into the paneling but unmistakable nonetheless - "Have you tried getting online? Maybe doing some basic recon, seeing what happens when you troogle 'what the hell is going on right now' or something? There's a computer right there."

"...shit, you're right," Meenah said, sounding more than a little dumbfounded. "Good eye."

They crowded around the computer, which upon turning on demanded a password; Karkat was about to start bemoaning his lack of relevant hacking skills when Meenah shouldered him aside and hammered in a sequence that was quickly accepted. When she caught him staring at her in disbelief, she grinned, and shrugged. "It's my room, apparently. Figured I should try my passwordfish."

"Right," he agreed, unsure whether to be annoyed that he hadn't thought of that first, or incredulous that it had actually worked. The interface wasn't entirely familiar to either of them, but it didn't take long to find an internet browser and from there, a few clues as to what was going on.

_\- Ultimatian imperial expansion progressing at unprecedented rates -_

_\- Her Implacable Vaingloriousness killed in royal astrobarge crash in colony system -_

_\- coronation tipped to be the event of the millennium! 5 fashion faux pas for the discerning highblood to avoid -_

_\- whereabouts of 6-sweep-old secondary heir unknown -_

Karkat looked up from the screen as the door slid open somewhere behind them, and the jadeblood from earlier cautiously peered in.

"You need somefin?" Meenah demanded, straightening up to her full height, and Karkat tried to step behind her as casually as possible.

"My pardon. You seemed upset earlier, you majesty," the jade said, looking a little confused at the placid scene in the room.

"Yeah, upset I'm surfrounded by idiots," Meenah drawled, and made a dismissive gesture. "We good. You'll know if I need shit."

The adult retreated, the door closed, and Karkat realized he'd been holding his breath.

"Well, it's not as deep a pit of noxious waste as we _could_ have landed in," he said, a little doubtfully.

Meenah cackled. "What's with the sour hook?" she demanded. "We did it, we got a universe an' I'm as good as empress!"

"Yeah, if you don't manage to get yourself assassinated," Karkat retorted. "And if Feferi doesn't pull something - if we're somehow improbably here a new universe in one piece and alive and shit, there's no reason not to assume that 'secondary heir' isn't her. And if the rest of the assjacks I'm forced to, for lack of a better term, refer to as our teammates don't manage to ruin everything running around unsupervised."

Meenah blinked at him. "You're reely worried?"

He took a deep breath, and tried to banish the feeling that he was a total idiot to say what he was about to say to anyone with fins, let alone an imperial title. "Meenah, I didn't survive as long as I did on Alternia as I did by not being really fucking freaked out by everything," he said, as gravely as he could manage. "I know Beforus was less of an abject hellhole, and I don't know what it's like here, but if this is anything like Alternia then at least half of the people we know are fully capable of getting killed in an extremely painful and embarrassing manner within the next few days."

He hesitated for a moment, then added, "And yeah, that includes you. And you're the one with the ability to take the rest of us down with you."

Meenah's face fell, and for a moment Karkat wasn't sure whether he wanted to comfort her or hide behind the nearest piece of furniture, or take it all back and ride stoically into whatever ridiculously unnecessary doom resulted. 

She sighed, scuffing the toe of her sneaker against the tiled floor. "So what's the plan, then?"

Karkat was caught off guard. "What?"

"I'm a shitty supreme empress'f all I survey if I don't shut up and listen when one'a my best tacfishions tells me I'm about to get us all killed dead," Meenah conceded. "Sgrub shenanigans notwithangling, I don't actually like the idea of horrible death, you know? So what's the plan."

Honestly, Karkat hadn't actually expected the opportunity to implement a plan other than possibly bemoaning his fate while everything went to shit, but what the hell. He shrugged. "I don't have one yet, really. We should probably get a better feel for what we've gotten ourselves into."

 

The next few hours were spent researching, scrounging up scratch paper and tape - a little investigation found a study that opened off the leisureblock, which provided all of what Meenah insisted on calling their "creepy conspiracy-theorist supplies" - and eventually turning one wall into as comprehensive a flowchart of Ultimatian politics and culture as Karkat could hope to make in the course of a day.

"That tape is gonna be shell on my wallpaper," Meenah commented, as they stepped back and admired their handywork.

Karkat rolled his eyes. "I'm sure you can afford to remodel," he said, "especially since you're *definitely* tipped to be the next empress. I don't see Feferi pushing the issue unless you make her."

"I _could_ , though," she said thoughtfully.

"Yeah, if you had a death wish. We don't know what kind of backup she's got, but 'she's' been AWOL since before 'we' got here," he pointed out. "It's probably safe to assume that she fell in with people who'll support her, maybe even some of our own. Plus she's been training basically her whole life to depose a bigger, scarier version of you. It'd be smarter to keep diplomatic channels open, if we can get in touch with her."

Meenah sighed, and nodded. "For the moment at least," she said, and Karkat _really_ hoped that if they were going to go ahead and have a civil war, they'd at least have the decency to wait until he'd lived out his natural lifespan.

"Right now I think our bigger issue is tracking down the rest of the group," he said, trying to steer the discussion away from Meenah's obvious desire to fight her dancestor. "Some of them are probably in pretty hot water by now."

"Captors," she agreed quickly, and he looked up at her in surprise. "Well, they use the same kinda biopsionic helms here as they did in your universe, right? If I got dumped in the heiress's palace and you got stuck in the servants' quarters, Tuna' s probably got stuck in some kind of helming facility and there's no way putting a guy in his shape in a rig is gonna be good for anyone."

"Sollux is in better condition physically, but he might blow shit up just for the sake of being a jackass," Karkat agreed. "You think you can get them out? It might take a while to find them."

Meenah grinned. "We'll shut it _all_ down," she said, with some satisfaction. "Last empress got smushed against the side of a planet in a psionic-helmed ship, right? We order an emergensea shut down of the helming industry in the name of safety, then keep throwing seamonkey wrenches in the works until we find our guys."

"That... might work," Karkat admitted, with begrudging admiration.

"And the lady cleric at the circus church promised she'd keep an eye out for any Makaras wandering around being all clownshit and stuff," Meenah added.

"And if anyone else manages to get themselves killed in the next three days, I've underestimated their complete incompetence," Karkat agreed. "We'll track them down sooner or later, but I think that does it for now. If you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go indulge in a nice round of hyperventilating over getting shoved back into civilization."

Meenah laughed, which he thought was a little unnecessary given that he was only half joking, and caught his arm as he turned to walk away. "Not so basst, Shouty," she chided, and pulled one more piece of paper out of the pile. "I tracked this shit down while you were talking to the church lady. I just gotta sign it and get it logged, and it should hold up at least until after I get coronated for real and I can do whatever the shell I want."

As Karkat looked over the printout, bemused and a little disbelieving, the seadweller continued, "I don't know if it'll hold up in the long term but I think it'll do until I can figure out how to do this shit through the proper channels and make it stick."

"Meenah," Karkat said, when he was certain what he was reading, "I _think_ this invalidates all hemovarient cull policies current in the empire."

"Uh, yeah, duh," she said, draping an arm across his shoulders. "I'm gonna need you, Karkat. And you ain't bad company, either. Can't have you getting dragged off for being a weird-ass color."

Almost without realizing it, he leaned into the side-hug, scrubbing at one eye with the heel of his hand, trying to clear his vision, which was absolutely just going swimmy because he'd spent all day staring at computer screens and printouts and his eyes were tired, and definitely did not have anything to do with his off-spectrum bodily fluids currently reaching a serious imbalance in his tear glands out of emotion. "I'm probably ok as long as I don't wander off," he pointed out, after a moment.

"Maybe. I don't wanna put a leash on you, though," Meenah pointed out with a chuckle "I wanna make sure you're safe, ok?"

Karkat was not exactly accustomed to safety, but hey. It wasn't like he had an objection to the idea. He nodded, wiping his eyes again, and offered a sharp, if slightly shaky smile.

"We are going to make the _best_ empress out of you, you know that?" he said, and she laughed again.

Karkat thought he could get used to that laugh.


End file.
